PR IN 2017- Trends to watch out for

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1. ‘Thought leadership’ is a real thing

Marketers and PR-specialists alike have been using this term quite often the past year, with still quite a few of their eyes rolling. But look at it this way, your company is specialized in “something”. You do something and you do something well – otherwise, you’d be out of business, right?

So who knows more about the topic of “something” than your own executives? It’s a logical pathway for PR. Using your own employees as experts in the industry, representing their own unique voice and not your overly commercial ‘brands’ voice, leading to a better received honest conversation between the public and them.

2. Content and SEO isn’t enough anymore – you need multipliers

Writing content and making sure it is ‘findable’ via SEO is simply not enough anymore to drive traffic to your website. You need to find multipliers, ‘influencers’ that already have the audience you are targeting but also mechanisms that will propel your content from circle to circle.

Contrary to prior times, influencers are not just the bloggers and celebrities of this world – we’re now seeing an era of influencers born from the corporate world. Corporate executives and CEO’s – whether in the public eye or not - hold very strong endorsement capabilities and often carry a circle of followers and fans that are interested in the topic at hand. Engaging with these profiles can often be a cost-effective and efficient method for gaining traction.

3. Paid promotion & social ads are still a thing

Social media advertising globally is still continuing to grow at an exponential rate. Advertising and marketing budgets are being spent on digital platforms and moving away from traditional methods. In 2015 alone, digital advertising budgets grew to represent more than 32% of total advertising budget.

4. Native advertising is even more of a thing

According to a study released late last year by Adyoulike, worldwide spending on advertising will soar to over 56 million euros in 2018. Unsurprisingly so, as publishers as well as advertisers have seen a stringent decline in traditional advertising performance such as display, in part due to the meteoric rise of ad blockers.

So for 2017, we can only expect to see this number rise for as long as publishers and advertisers work together to make sure the content delivered is relevant and well targeted to avoid mainstream backlash and spam.

5. PR has become more than AVE

The world has moved away from PR being limited to sending press releases and measuring the Advertising Value Equivalency. PR is now formulated in native advertising, social ads, influencer marketing, offline activations and much more. The downfall to this is that tracking and measuring your PR efforts takes a little more skill than it used to, however, the good news is that the PR tracking and measuring industry has also evolved.

Companies are now able to have automatic speech-to-text transcriptions, logo-detection on multiple platforms (for example if a user posts a video showing your product without ever mentioning the brand name, the system will recognize it), as well as the ever growing functionality to cross reference different platforms to gain one general insight into your brands’ visibility status and PR efforts.

If you want to find out how Auxipress can help you effectively measure your PR efforts, get in touch now